Server based game augmentations. The transition to cloud. Really possible?

[Billy Idol]

Thanks guys for the procedural generated worlds discussion.

 

[taisui]

If its just a cooler destruction of a building, fine you can use a canned offline version, but are there things that would break the game if the cloud was not available?

If online is optional then game won't break, if it's required then it'll break. Who's to say that the new Crackdown won't be like Titanfall which is online only?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

If online is optional then game won't break, if it's required then it'll break. Who's to say that the new Crackdown won't be like Titanfall which is online only?

I have a feeling there are very few (approaching none) PS4/XB1s that aren't connected to the internet. The only question then is, how many have a decent connection (at least 1 Mbit)?

Looking in my area (smallish city around 250k population), 1.5 Mbit appears to be the slowest available from any of the broadband providers (DSL/Cable).

Even in the country at the family ranch where there is no wired internet available, the mobile wireless is quite good. Of course, the problem then becomes potential bandwidth caps.

But as long as a game is marked as Online connection required (Like Titanfall or Final Fantasy 14, for example) then I don't see the problem there either.

Regards,
SB

 

[imaxx]

I have a feeling there are very few (approaching none) PS4/XB1s that aren't connected to the internet.

...do you also have it in your house-at-beach? Or the friend of your kid that is inviting him to the beach, does have it? And at which latency, for example?
I have a very bad internet connection in a rented house I leave, and with high latency it would maybe screw things up?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

...do you also have it in your house-at-beach? Or the friend of your kid that is inviting him to the beach, does have it? And at which latency, for example?
I have a very bad internet connection in a rented house I leave, and with high latency it would maybe screw things up?

Obviously in that case you wouldn't be playing "internet only" games like Warframe (PS4), Warthunder (PS4), Final Fantasy XIV (PS4), Titanfall (XB1), etc.

Hence, if the game uses this extensively, it'd likely also be "internet only."

Regards,
SB

 

[iroboto]

Gonna file this one here off Reddit since it's been nicely summarized.
http://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/2d0ht6/some_cloud_information_from_a_game_dev_on_neogaf/

** EDIT UNPROVEN SOURCE **

This is from a developer currently working on two variants of their game, on-line / off-line. He mentions that it would be highly _addictive_ to just go online only even for a single player game. I guess from what I'm reading, you're looking at environmental effects that could stay in cloud based RAM for long periods of time without it eating into the console, at that point in time it's just about rendering it when it's in view.

Topic post:

I know GAF "in general" is very pessimistic about the cloud. And yes, somehow I can understand that - because so far, there weren't that much games that really took advantage of server calculations. To be honest, no new-gen so far really did (Titanfall touched 5% of the possibilities ...). And this is also why I try to be very careful about the words I choose.
No. You can not boost your games resolution with Azure. And no. You can not create better lighting effects with Azure. But, if you focus on it, you can still boost the overall graphical look of your game by a mile. We are currently creating a game. But in fact, we are kind of creating two-in-one. One with Azure available, and one for offline only. Everything you code, you need to code for two scenerarios. This is a ton of work. if online = dynamic grass; if offline=static grass ... To say it very simple. And so on.That's why we are currently thinking about going "online-only". But to be very open to you, we have some fear about that. Obviously. The gaming community is very careful when they hear "online-only" ... Games like Sim City simply ... Well, did it wrong.
If I could show you a screen comparison of our latest build right now - Azure on/off (no, sorry, I can't ...), you would understand what I am talking about. Wind, dynamically moving vegetations, footprints that stay for hours and even wildlife nearly without losing any local CPU power. This is just awesome in the right situations.
I know MS has some own projects in the works, too, that will go all-in with the Azure servers. Crackdown is the already known example.
That's all I can say for now. Really. I'm out here!

 

[Lalaland]

If it is actually a dev working on a game leveraging the cloud for ambient animations then that could be interesting. I know posters earlier in the thread pointed to animation, particularly 'world' animation, as being a good target for remote compute offload. Given that most of the world is reacting to predictable game systems such as wind it should be possible to sync world states between local and remote resources allowing the sever to compute animations ahead of real time and send world animations back to be buffered locally (to allow for network variability). To me it seems plausible that this person is working on a game or is at least knowledgeable enough to avoid the trap of the wilder claims of 'insiders'.

 

[DrJay24]

Now Jr posters on GAF are B3D sources?

 

[iroboto]

Now Jr posters on GAF are B3D sources?

it's still being proven, he's not banned (yet) , and I'll edit my comment and add 'still unproven' for now.

 

[Alucardx23]

Interesting example on how cloud progressing can help.

"Running in real-time on XBO. Very early wip, so don't care for the lighting and so on. It is a very basic frequency test where the grass splines update 12 times a second. This is nothing special so far. The cool thing is tho that the start and endpoints of our splines influenced by wind and objects are being calculated by Azure. This means: the physic calculations you see are costing us pretty much no local power (excluding GPU ofc). We can use the saved power for other things - like AI, animations and so on. We are very proud of it - especially since we completely eliminated any chance of clipping. I just wanted to add that here."

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=124716302&postcount=84

 

[zed]

a golf ball (no dimples but based on grass size)
10,000 blades of grass, say 10 positions per blade = say a byte per position x 12 = 1MB/sec to simulate an area 10cm x 10cm. This is not a good use for cloud, The cloud should be used for complex calucations eg the AI stuff

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If they are developing technologies for use in games, they can't be using such straight forward solutions. I'd guess something more like running the ball collisions and returning a 'flattened' vector that the GPU uses in a custom geometry/displacement type shader. The cloud handles the collision overhead and the GPU only need worry about rendering grass, which it'll be doing anyway. Things like wind direction could be sent as a compressed 2D representation

 

[zed]

Shifty if its doing it on the cloud, I assume theyre doing some decent collision etc (so no grass intersection each other etc) now the only way they can send this info back is by sending back an absolute shed load of data ~100MByte (not bit)/ sec for a single square meter of grass, who heres got a ~1TB/sec internet connection!
this is like an absolute worse case of using the cloud.
A far better example is AI eg path solving with complex large datafield

i.e. use the cloud for something that requires lots of calculations but doesnt require sending back absolutely massive amounts of data if theyre gonna do what theyre doing in the above they might as well send back the final image that you get on the screen, its prolly a lot less data

 

[Scott_Arm]

Shifty if its doing it on the cloud, I assume theyre doing some decent collision etc (so no grass intersection each other etc) now the only way they can send this info back is by sending back an absolute shed load of data ~100MByte (not bit)/ sec for a single square meter of grass, who heres got a ~1TB/sec internet connection!
this is like an absolute worse case of using the cloud.
A far better example is AI eg path solving with complex large datafield

i.e. use the cloud for something that requires lots of calculations but doesnt require sending back absolutely massive amounts of data if theyre gonna do what theyre doing in the above they might as well send back the final image that you get on the screen, its prolly a lot less data

Do you really think they'd try 10,000 blades of grass in a 10cm x 10cm square?

A small tech demo (if it's even legit) is not necessarily showing how you'd implement the tech in a game.

 

[Nesh]

Do you really think they'd try 10,000 blades of grass in a 10cm x 10cm square?

A small tech demo (if it's even legit) is not necessarily showing how you'd implement the tech in a game.

But this us a hypothetical 10cm x 10 cm square. Scale that to a larger area with 10,000 blades and you d still need a large amount of data. If the use of cloud is subtle then there is even less reason to rely on it. The average joe wont notice

 

[steveOrino]

Do you really think they'd try 10,000 blades of grass in a 10cm x 10cm square?

A small tech demo (if it's even legit) is not necessarily showing how you'd implement the tech in a game.

Thats kind of the point right? I really dont know what "they" would or wouldn't try. And since no one has seen anything that makes a lick of difference in a shipping game then I guess the potential of these "cloud based game augmentations" will remain.... cloudy.

 

[Scott_Arm]

But this us a hypothetical 10cm x 10 cm square. Scale that to a larger area with 10,000 blades and you d still need a large amount of data. If the use of cloud is subtle then there is even less reason to rely on it. The average joe wont notice

Well, you're missing the point that I was trying to make, that this is a tech demo to demonstrate the concept of physics in the cloud. Just because they're demoing grass doesn't mean they'd actually implement grass this way in an actual game. It's a proof of concept, if it's even real.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Thats kind of the point right? I really dont know what "they" would or wouldn't try. And since no one has seen anything that makes a lick of difference in a shipping game then I guess the potential of these "cloud based game augmentations" will remain.... cloudy.

What's the point? Being able to render 10,000 blades of glass in a 10cm x 10cm square? The point is being able to do physics calculations online, so that the local box doesn't have to do them. I have no idea how it'll actually be implemented in a real game. It could be grass swaying in the wind, or parting as players move through it. It might be something totally different. Crackdown will probably the first game to demonstrate anything really concrete, and we have no idea if it'll turn out to be something minor or major.

 

[NRP]

The possibilities are certainly interesting. I hope the tech pans out and is actually useful for increasing immersion. I could see this really enhancing PvE games.

 

[function]

Well, you're missing the point that I was trying to make, that this is a tech demo to demonstrate the concept of physics in the cloud. Just because they're demoing grass doesn't mean they'd actually implement grass this way in an actual game. It's a proof of concept, if it's even real.

It's suprising this needs explaining, though aparrently it does, even here.

And there are all kinds of ways in which you could avoid sending the precise position and motion vectors for each blade of grass, each tick, during a game (especially as this is just a visual approximation and not the actual simulation).

The possibilities are certainly interesting. I hope the tech pans out and is actually useful for increasing immersion. I could see this really enhancing PvE games.

Absolutely. No point caculating everything locally for each user in co-op / MMO PvE game when you can calculate it once and avoiding syncing using local braodband uplaod (which will stink).

Could do some really, really awesomely cool stuff with a persistent shared environment.